A Future Happening: The Man Without Qualities' Unfinishable History.

Robert Musil's monumental, unfinished novel The Man Without Qualities (1930–1943) utilizes its vast possibilities to inscribe a re-figuration of dominant historical materialism. It reflects on different approaches to history beyond a "mnemotechnic" of inscription, instead encouraging engagement with...

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Publicado en:Journal of Modern Literature Vol. 48; no. 4; pp. 1 - 20
Autor principal: Dutton, James
Formato: Literary Criticism
Publicado: Indiana University Press Summer2025
Materias:
Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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        atl: A Future Happening: The Man Without Qualities' Unfinishable History.
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        au: Dutton, James
        affil: University of New South Wales
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        Man Without Qualities, The (Book)
        Musil, Robert, 1880-1942
        Materialism
        Hermeneutics
        Inscriptions
        20th century (Literary period)
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          Man Without Qualities, The (Book)
          Musil, Robert, 1880-1942
          Materialism
          Hermeneutics
          Inscriptions
          20th century (Literary period)
      keyword:
        history
        inscription
        materiality
        Robert Musil
        Walter Benjamin
      ab: Robert Musil's monumental, unfinished novel The Man Without Qualities (1930–1943) utilizes its vast possibilities to inscribe a re-figuration of dominant historical materialism. It reflects on different approaches to history beyond a "mnemotechnic" of inscription, instead encouraging engagement with textuality through open hermeneutics—and not only in nominally literary or aesthetic discourses. Musil's novel invites applying this approach to history, where his narrator explores how we might consider the happenings of the world (and their discursive restrictions through writing) differently, by attempting to think with their opening to possible interpretive futures. By emphasising the possibility of allegory over historicist mnemotechnics, Musil's purposefully unfinished text maps its philosophy of a writing that is unpredictably material onto history, which can only happen—endlessly—in the future.
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